Gnus reads my mail

From:

Stefan Monnier

Subject:

Gnus reads my mail

Date:

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:53:48 -0500

User-agent:

Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

To my horror, I found no new mail in my `emacs' imap-folder this morning
(the splitting is done asynchronously by procmail, not by Gnus).
Now, I knew full well that this couldn't be, and I also had a suspicion
something was up with Gnus and my `emacs' folder (yesterday, it told me
I had about 10000 new messages, and although it's normal for Gnus to
overestimate the number of new messages, 10000 is way out of proportion), so
after trying a few things under Gnus, I took a look at that folder via
webmail, and lo and behold I have received messages in that folder since
last time I read it, but they were marked as "seen".
It turns out that it's Gnus that marked those things as "seen".
So in webmail, I marked the last 30 or so messages as "unseen", and then
I did the following:
- .../trunk/src/emacs --eval '(setq imap-debug t nnimap-debug t)' -f gnus
- type in my imap password
- save *imap-debug* to `imap-log-startup'
- enter the `nnimap+diro:emacs' folder (which said "0" new messages)
- save *imap-debug* to `imap-log-enter'
- leave the emacs folder
- save *imap-debug* to `imap-log-leave'
- save *nnimap-debug* to `imap-log-nnimap'
Meanwhile I also checked via webmail the status of my last few messages, and
unsurprisingly it's when I left the `emacs' folder that Gnus marked the
messages as "seen".
I've attached the imap-log-* files, compressed.
It seems the problem is specific to my `nnimap+diro:emacs' folder.
At least it does not affect my other folders `nnimap+diro:diro' and
`nnimap+diro:inbox' where I also received messages and could read them
normally with Gnus. Maybe other folders are affected, but I didn't
notice it.
My `emacs' folder is about 30MB in size, which is smaller than my
`diro' folder. OTOH my `emacs' folder is the largest in terms of number of
messages (5415), but that doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the
problem (I at first suspected some kind of msg-nb wrap around or some kind
of emacs-integer overflow, but that doesn't seem very likely).
Although Gnus did not literally *eat* my email, I find this problem to be
very serious since it might make me miss important email messages.
Stefan